Government 'at risk of losing its way' with digital strategy

The government digital strategy is at risk of losing its way
only five years in, said Cambridge Business School's Mark Thompson,
speaking today at an event hosted by EMC and Policy Exchange on how
technology can be used to reinvent government. The two
organisations are currently writing a joint technology manifesto to
advise the government on transforming public services through
technology.

"The government spent 20 years in indulging itself in building
bespoke IT in a frenzied splurge," said Thompson, former adviser to
chancellor George Osborne and the Cabinet Office on IT
reform. This has caused two problems: firstly it has
encouraged nesting behaviour by departments and local authorities,
and secondly with each indulgence the public sector decoupled
itself further and further from the global mainstream -- partly due
to the fact that when software was delivered, it was already out of
date. In order to avoid this kind of problem in future, the
government should "consume rather than build its tech unless
absolutely necessary", he added.

Not all those attending the debate felt that the government was
necessarily failing at embracing digital though. Paul Maltby from
the Cabinet Office pointed to the progress made by the Government Digital Service and
the successful transferral of DVLA and HMRC to online platforms. He
acknowledged though that while there are success stories in pockets
of government, there is still work to be done. "It's important that
we don't' put digital technology in a box over in a corner," he
said. "We need to embrace those opportunities to provide better
services for less money."

Policy Exchange research has identified £33 billion worth of savings that could be made
if technology and data analytics are employed efficiently, pointed
out James Petter from EMC. But, he added, government needs to "get
past cost saving focus". Peter Wells, project lead of Labour's
Digital Government Review, agreed, saying that "if all technology
does is cut costs it's going to create barriers". In order to
succeed in successfully using technology to reshape government is
it important to put citizens rather than saving money at the centre
of digital change and make sure strategies respond directly to
their needs, he remarked.

Responding to a question from Policy Exchange's Eddie Copeland,
Maltby claimed that citizens will start to notice the benefits of
the government's digital strategy when the 25 services currently
undergoing digital transformation -- most of which are
currently in beta -- become fully available online. Thompson
responded by saying that most people will only use those service at
most one time a year and that changes will go over most peoples'
heads until they are applied to the services "that touch people
every day", in areas like healthcare, social care and housing.

"While there's been some good progress, as a nation we're not
moving fast enough to deliver efficient government," said Petter.
The government has barely even scratched the surface when it comes
to tapping into the datasets that are available to it and citizens
expect better levels of agility and responsiveness from government,
as do government employees, he added. To create the kind of rapid
acceleration required, there needs to be more focus on
infrastructure, entrepreneurial zeal and agility and leadership in
order to "move away from outdated approaches bogged down in
inertia".

There has been a lot of talk about how the government can become
more agile in order to more rapidly respond to digital change, but
Thompson believes that being "agile" is not a disruptive enough
strategy to bring about the real change that is needed.

"Agile involves building your own stuff all over again," he
says, which "leaves hierarchies in place. Agile is funky yet is
unthreatening -- it's the perfect storm. Agile is nonsense without
self control, reuse and a conceptual framework".

Instead of inserting exciting new interfaces into the current
system and "this silly pretend transformation we've had over the
last twenty years", there needs to be a fundamental reshaping of
the public sector business model, he argued.

"The problem is that reinventing government is fundamentally a
political and not a technology issue." he said. The real barrier
seems to be that embracing digital fully would be too disruptive
for established hierarchies and force the merging of departments.
But without enacting that level of change, "the promise of digital
is already starting to fade".